


King of the Heap

by themoonfish



Series: Blinks of Light [2]
Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Post-Terra Firma 3x10, integrated Philippa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 06:06:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28540764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themoonfish/pseuds/themoonfish
Summary: How is it that the more she finds herself loving Michael—a feat that scientifically should not have been possible—the more incomplete she feels?Philippa and Michael begin to settle into a life together, but something is missing.
Relationships: Michael Burnham/Mirror Philippa Georgiou, Michael Burnham/Philippa Georgiou
Series: Blinks of Light [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090766
Comments: 7
Kudos: 62





	King of the Heap

**Author's Note:**

> An attempt to reconcile Philippa's different experiences of Michael over the years with her desire to be a mother. A story in which the story of Mirror Michael being plucked from a rubbish heap becomes a bedtime story and Philippa reckons with the loss of one Michael at the gain of another. 
> 
> I took some liberty with the line _"I was Master of that Trash Heap."_ I took some liberty with a few other things as well 👀 but tried to keep it otherwise consistent.

“If this should be, I say  
If this should be you of my heart  
Send me a little word  
That I may go unto her  
And take her hands saying  
Accept all happiness from me  
Then I shall turn my face  
And hear one bird sing terribly  
Afar in the lost lands”

 _Sonnets/Unrealities IX_ , Björk

  
  
God had judged her and found her wanting. In her nightmares, she dreams of returning to the door on the edge of forever over and over again, doomed to repeat the worst moments of her life, ad infinitum. Those first few months she wakes up with a metallic taste in her mouth and a whisper of the hilt of a sword against the inside of her closed fist. What she’s never been certain of is whether the blade she wakes with in the morning is the one lodged in her heart or lodged in her neck.

The dreams lessen the more Michael shares her bed. Somehow, the other woman always knows when to wake her and say, _I’m here and_ _I'm not going anywhere._

Over time the dreams fade as much as any other life-altering traumatic event does, with a dedicated amount of denial and determination. In truth, most nights wrapped in Michael’s arms, she cannot bring herself to worry about past wrongs and timeline incursions. Not if they’ve all brought her here.

And yet, some nights she wakes panicked and breathless, until she can make out the memory of Dr. Hugh Culber’s calm voice on loop walking her through the motions: 

_Name five things you can see,_

_Name five things you can hear,_

_Name five things you can touch._

She kisses Michael in the mornings and wonders if there will ever be a day when one of the five things she can taste are regret, but as the days go by, it never happens. 

But there is something...yawning. Growing larger by the minute. Something lodged under the cover of her breast. And it eats away at her, this nameless, mounting restlessness. How is it that the more she finds herself loving Michael—a feat that scientifically should not have been possible—the more incomplete she feels? 

Michael, however watchful, never asks. Philippa never answers. She doesn’t even know what the real question is, until the answer literally strikes out of the blue, asleep and dreaming, drifting out to space in a battered escape pod. 

Michael and Philippa are out for a supply run in an efficient little shuttle named the _Charon_ when the last dregs of an ion storm break out across the bough. It’s a bumpy ride but they manage to hold on to navigational sensors and most of their shields though everything else, other than the unimpressive impulse engines, is disabled. 

Just when they’re reckoning with being sitting ducks in the proverbial water waiting for the Discovery to return to the rendezvous coordinates, something glances off the ship’s shields and sends the shuttle rocking hard enough that Philippa’s curiosity is piqued sufficiently to hold her interest. 

Unlike on the _Discovery_ , the shuttle’s computer is cold and unfeeling and doesn’t mince words.

They were struck by an escape pod, its only occupant is an approximately 2.5 year old humanoid. Female. _Life signs unclear._

She is at the emergency biobed in an instant waiting for the telltale hum of the shuttle’s transporters, arms itching to receive their unexpected patient. 

Philippa has forgotten just how small children can be and this particular child is small for her age. Her sienna brown skin is not unlike Michael’s, but it is alien in its slight glow. As Emperor, Philippa had never had much use for medical training beyond healing the occasional stab wound or knitting together the occasional bone. As Captain, she had an array of medical assistants, doctors, and science officers aboard that handled Sickbay and its accompanying labs with very little oversight. Neither of them are that confident in her old field medic skills, but she’s adept enough to run the regenerator over the bruised patches of skin and the scratches on the faintly ridged forehead before her. She brushes the child’s soft curly hair back and her killer instinct tells her that this child is not a threat but more likely an unfortunate casualty of war.

It’s unclear how long their visitor has been floating out there in the expanse of space, frightened and alone. Data retrieval from the escape pod’s computer isn’t very helpful beyond the basics. Michael runs the data again and again, from multiple angles, but comes to the same conclusion. 

Whoever this girl is, she’s alone.

Last known coordinates suggest that whomever or whatever else that had been floating alongside her had been taken into the worst parts of the ion storm and broken apart into fields of debris sprinkled around the parsec. It’s no small miracle that this girl has floated safely along the edges of the storm all this time.

It’s no small miracle at all. 

Philippa can’t bring herself to set their passenger down. Once she’s certain there’s no damage to the spinal column, she lifts the girl into her arms. She fears the tiny thing has long been unconscious but Michael’s own cursory scans assure her that the child is merely asleep.

Every so often the little girl twitches and Philippa is given to mindlessly rocking her while Michael runs scans for the Discovery between laughing softly at the sleeping girl. “She sleeps like an angel.”

When they’re finally able to transfer her to the Discovery’s sickbay, Hugh confirms Michael’s initial suspicions. 

“She’s on the small side and a little malnourished,” he admits, _“_ but she’s a fighter and I think she’ll fit in just fine here.”

It wouldn’t do for her to stay in Sickbay. As protocol dictated, she’d need to be relocated, settled somewhere on and then eventually off the ship, but seeing the calculating gleam in Georgiou’s eyes, Culber doesn’t dare suggest the latter. Instead, he replicates the basics and explains everything, thoroughly until Georgiou pulls aways with exhausted frustration ensuring him this is far from her ‘first rodeo,’ and unless he’s suggesting she’s medically or mentally unfit to care for this child in anyway, she would very much like to be on her way.

Culber, who has never been one to be phased by the woman before, acquiesces and tactfully offers to transport them directly to quarters. Normally, as First Officer Michael abhors such unnecessary energy expenditures but they’re tired and sore and Philippa finds herself shell shocked and already weary of what exchanges the ship’s corridors might bring. 

As Michael dutifully prepares everything for transport, Hugh gives their newest passenger a last once over, before grazing a lone finger against one of the glowing cherubic cheeks.

“Uriel.” He says with a gentle smile on his face.

“What?” Philippa asks confusedly.

“Uriel. It’s the name of an old Earthen angel. It means divine light.” The sphere data had been critical in assuring them all that her glow wasn‘t the byproduct of harmful radiation. Her inner light is completely natural and utterly endearing. 

Michael, who has at last finished her task, slings an arm around Philippa’s side and leans in to smooth a thumb against the toddler’s adorable scrunched up brow. 

“Hello there little Uri.” Michael coos and Philippa, who has certainly _not_ found herself inexplicably weak in the knees, frowns and adjusts the blanket on her shoulder sniffing

_“You will not be calling my daughter Uri.”_

If either the ship’s Commanding First Officer or Chief Medical Officer catch Philippa’s mistake, which is to say her premature admission, then they know better than to comment on it. It is, however, difficult to miss the not-so-secret smile they share before the new family dematerializes away.

It’s decided right then and there. The girl is family, but forever and always to Philippa’s chagrin, nobody (not even Philippa herself) calls her anything other than Uri. 

Uri fits into their lives perfectly, which is to say, chaotically and messily and in a way that brings Philippa a pure sense of joy she hadn’t known to be possible in this universe. No matter who or where she is, there is no balm for her soul better than the laughter of children. In Uri’s presence her own laughter flows more freely and her smiles become more genuine. Uri is the promise of spring after a long cold winter, and Philippa’s been frozen a long time. 

In the blink of an eye, the days melt into weeks and the weeks melt into months and suddenly a year has passed and their cautious, slow talking love is a social butterfly, wandering into private quarters, sneaking into the Jeffries tubes above Engineering, and slipping into unlocked cargo bins hidden deep within the bowels of the ship. Some days, Philippa finds herself wondering what Michael was like when she was this young. If she also hung from rafters giggling, if she effortlessly dodged between the legs of her earliest guardians, if she clung to the arms of her mother with the same fierceness that Uri clings to her mother, the same fierceness that Philippa clings to Uri now?

These days, Uri isn’t all that Philippa calls her daughter. She’s taken to calling her Firefly, Angel, Sweet, and most recently, _trouble_. The number of times she’s had to demand Uri drop from whatever new height she’s recently managed to scale has Philippa seriously concerned that the poor child might actually be convinced her name is Trouble with a capital T after all. 

The once captain-cum-emperor spends her days between advising Captain Saru and Admiral Vance (she so enjoys her new found ability to foment diplomatic and political unrest as quickly as she can solve it) and chasing a bundle of energy around the halls of the ‘Disco’ in impractical leather and heeled boots that she wouldn’t dream of giving up for _anyone_ —no matter how much she loved them. 

It’s a queer thing being two different women inside of a single body, but she never complains, not when Michael hasn’t any qualms about worshiping at either altar.

She is as comfortable behind the conn of a starship as she is using her four year old daughter to terrorize the people who staff it. Besides, being a rogue Section 31 agent has its perks and maintaining a flexible schedule that leaves her mornings and nights freer than any assignment she’s ever worked before is undoubtedly one of them. It gives her more time to dedicate to the things that really matter, like being a delightfully menacing presence for the crew and selfishly dedicating her time to Uri and Michael, _her darlings._

The Captain in her has curbed her imperial longing, shrinking the reach of her domain to the cozy space of their retrofitted family quarters on the ship. In the hallowed halls of the _Discovery_ or the lifeless white and meandering corridors of Starfleet Command, she is content to be no one. But within the four walls of her own home, she’s a queen. 

At bedtime on those evenings when Michael is late getting off shift, the indomitable Philippa Georgiou climbs into the twin sized bed of her toddler and regales her with stories of past lives. Uri’s favorite is always the story of the mysterious drifting escape pod that dropped a precious girl out of the sky as though she were an angel, a shockingly recurring theme in Philippa’s life. 

“Tell me my story Ammi.” Uri would say, pushing her little ridged forehead into Philippa’s, impressing upon her mother the urgency with which the child needed her story to be told. Uri’s inability to ask for anything using the trappings of civility was Philippa’s fault, or so Michael insisted. Neither Georgiou had been very invested in the theatrics of niceties. Clear, concise, and straight to the point was much more her style. She doesn’t see the sense in instilling such mindless drivel in her daughter either. Philippa hardly ever said please and thank you, and when she did it was _always_ for good reason. Uri’s impetuousness might be all Philippa, but her impishness was all Michael.

Michael is the real schemer, if you can believe it. On days when Philippa is off ship she returns home to dark quarters that look as though an array of bombs have gone off while she was away. Leaving her boots at the door, she picks past the stuffed animals and toppled couch cushions until the trail of destruction leads her into a pillow fort full of firefly glow and childish giggles that made it difficult to glower at the hours of cleaning that stretch on before them. 

Neither she nor Michael had particularly traditional childhoods, but mornings when her girls surprise her with breakfast in bed or insist on watching vids at home all day in their pajamas, she realizes they’re learning to play together, to soften, to explore the world—the universe even—outside of the confines of war and cascading threats to the future.

It’s quite wonderful really. 

And slowly, but surely, the more she thaws the more their little circle expands from a family of three to an ever growing extended network of watchful eyes and kind, guiding hands that make impromptu games of hide and seek much easier and safer than they would normally be on a ship of this size. There isn’t a single heart on this ship that Uri hasn’t stolen. She is Philippa’s daughter after all. 

The first heart she had properly stolen after those of her mothers’ had been that of the Discovery’s CMO. So it logically follows that Hugh Culber is Philippa’s first and, dare she say only, friend aboard the ship. She always knew his vast medical knowledge to be indispensable, but it is his bottomless well of patience that makes him the perfect candidate. After her tenth non-emergent visit to Sickbay the first month Uri was on board, the Doctor didn’t banish her from his domain so much as he _suggested_ that she might have been a bit more anxious than necessary all while assuring her it was totally normal for a new mother to worry.

She wanted to eviscerate him then. She wasn’t a new mother. And still, the first child the Emperor had mothered was nearly thirteen when she’d become her ward and the Captain had been a de facto mother to a crew of hundreds of fully grown adults, even if they had hardly acted accordingly. Further, Captain Georgiou had never considered the possibility of children outside the deepest recesses of her mind that not even the most skilled mind-melder would be able to pry from her. 

In that moment, logic had won out against spite but it was Hugh alone that had won her unwavering respect when he took every cough, sneeze, and tremor seriously. And when he graciously extended access to his private commline while insisting she call him whenever she could finally admit to needing a break, she had nearly pledged her undying loyalty to him on the spot. 

Uncle Hugh, as he is best known around these parts, is Uri’s favorite. They had gotten on famously since he gifted the little girl her favorite and first stuffed toy, a soft targ with floppy horns and a springy tail. There wasn’t a place she went without the targ Philippa had humorously named _Voq_ —with Michael’s dubious consent of course. Hugh was the first person allowed to keep her precious angel overnight, though the creative stream of threats she had made before walking out of the Doctor’s quarters had caused him to momentarily reconsider his offer. 

Beloved by all, Uri rarely struggles with being separated from her mothers’ as long as it is only for a determinable amount of time. But on days when Uri is particularly given to the whims of a toddler, there is nothing that motivates her to get dressed quicker than the promise that Doctor Culber is waiting for his favorite “chief medical assistant” to accompany him for the morning, which usually means wearing her most serious (and equally precious) face as she performs meticulous studies on old mycelium samples and runs biomedical scans on Voq whenever there’s a lull in the main bay. 

Nights after a morning in Sickbay mean Philippa has an endless stream of irrelevant facts about mushrooms and the biology of targs (both real and imaginary) to which she can look forward. No matter how exhausted she is, Philippa strips the dirty child sized white medical uniform from Uri’s body, how one child could make such a mess was beyond her, and coaxes her into soft pastel pajamas, humming and nodding in all the right places. She pulls the covers over her daughter’s chest, tucking them under the still babyish chin like clockwork. She kisses each chubby cheek as though it were holy and counts her lucky stars that this is the universe in which the time gods have conspired to keep her. Each additional day she wakes on this ship, even days she wakes in this cramped twin bed with her daughter’s limbs carelessly splayed in every direction and an endless array of tiny elbows lodged painfully into her ribs, is a benediction. 

Bedtime has become Philippa’s new favorite time of day. Uri is sweetest on the edge between consciousness and dreaming, when her eyes are full of soft light and love but her lids grow so heavy she has to fight to keep them open. Philippa treasures the nights when the three of them comically try to squeeze into the tiny bed together, whispering until Uri falls asleep or, in a most recent development, until she puts her parents to bed and climbs out of their slack embrace to cover them with her special blanket and wander into the family room to quietly play with her toys. 

Then there are nights when their work keeps them away from home, even more nights when Michael cannot take part in their little rituals. And in those nights when Michael’s absence is particularly felt by her most loving admirers, Uri will not sleep until Philippa tells Ayah’s story. The story about the first time a little girl fell from the sky off of the top of a junk metal mountain. 

_Tell me the story of the King of the Trash Heap_ , Uri pleads over and over until the fourth or fifth retelling materializes a grinning Ayah at the door. 

_Again_ , Uri cries with delight every time Philippa tells it. _Again_. So Philippa tells it again and again, until the memory is defanged and its cadence is so comforting that even Philippa can be momentarily convinced that the time before was a harmless dream, convinced that it was some other woman in some other life who had plucked Ayah Michael off of a trash heap and, she supposes, in this timeline it was.

One night, after admirably holding out for Michael, Uri slips off to sleep but not before grabbing Philippa’s cheeks between her tiny hands and proclaiming with a chilling childlike certainty, _Ammi, you plucked me off of that flying garbage heap, just like Ayah. You saved me._

Philippa barely manages to stumble into her own bed before quietly imploding into a million tiny pieces.

If Michael thinks anything of the fragile state she finds Philippa in later that evening, she doesn’t say. Pushing the older woman to speak before she’s ready, Michael knows, only ever ends in heartache and bruised egos. Instead, Michael walks into the closet to tip her shoes off and strip quickly, dropping her uniform into the recycler with a thud. On nights like these, when Philippa needs her most, the young commander chooses to climb into bed and forego a sonic shower altogether. The smell of Michael is cloying and overwhelming, yet safe. Michael has an inborn ability to make Philippa dangerously vulnerable. Without trying, she levels all of Philippa’s walls with a knowing look and sees what Philippa had never truly let another living being see before. It’s torture, endless torture, but _oh, the things we do for love._

Philippa lets Michael hold her, lets Michael bury her face into the older woman’s hair, and lets go of the mounting tension of the day. 

“I missed you.” Michael murmurs adoringly and Philippa sweeps her long hair from the back of her neck to encourage Michael to show her just how much. 

Hours later, in the twilight of space, Philippa lies wrapped up in Michael’s arms wondering just how she has come to love this little family _so much._ Love, she once believed, wasn’t in the cards for Philippa Georgiou. She had lived in lands where love was weakness apparent and she had lived in others where love wasn’t weakness so much as it was a discouraged liability. 

Lucky for her, good things don’t happen to Philippa Georgiou so much as they crash into her. They hurtle towards her at the speed of light, so much so that all of her most carefully made plans are knocked off course, unraveled by the sheer indignity of having made any plans in the first place. How did that saying go again? Her Most Imperial Majesty makes plans and the universe laughs? 

She supposes she had plucked both Uri and Michael off of heaps of flying metal, but can’t they see that they had somehow picked her first? Can’t they see how it is their love that moves the planets and the moons and the stars? Every evening that the day turns into night, they save her and every night that gives way to the day, they choose her, over and over again.

She loves them, wholly and indescribably. Nothing about her love for them can be contained in any one universe. _That_ , Michael tells their daughter, _is exactly why Ammi had to come from both._ She had traversed multiple universes and jumped a thousand years into the future just to be by their sides. 

Philippa isn’t ashamed to cry. Not here where only the two people she trusts most in the world can see her. Here, she isn’t afraid of feelings like hurt and shame or thirst and hunger. Here, Philippa isn’t afraid of the need that consumes her, the greedy desire to make something that is hers, something that is Michael’s, something that is theirs, and theirs alone. 

But here and now, for the first time in as long as she can remember, Philippa finds she isn’t afraid to fully grieve. 

In the time since her salvation, it felt irreverent to mourn the rotten underbelly of murderous glitz and glitter she had fought to remain on top of every day. To say she does not miss that life is an understatement at best. And yet to say she was glad to leave it all behind is an overstatement in its entirety. 

Philippa regrets nothing that brings her right here to this exact nanosecond where nearby there are five things she can see, five things she can hear, five things she can touch.

She regrets nothing, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think of the other girl she once loved through every fever, through every night-terror, through every broken bone and heartache. She thinks of that girl’s carefully preserved body, so quiet and still and free of suffering at last, hurtling through space in a metal torpedo casing. That selfsame body Philippa had cleaned the blood, sweat, and tears from by hand, dressing it in a shroud of white linen with intricate gold stitching, something she had been saving for Mi- _Her_ coronation. What a lovely funeral shroud it had made for her first true love. It was always Philippa’s aim to give her everything in life and, in the end, she had fulfilled that dying girl’s wish, making her king of the trash heap once again. 

She thanks that girl. She owes her life to that girl who loved her but could never fully trust her. It’s better this way, she knows, better that Michael and Uri are not her first loves. It means that they are not destined to be the culmination of her greatest mistakes, that they aren’t the tragic anti-heroes of her own making. 

Her feelings for Uri and Michael are vast but different. She doubts that she could ever love anyone like she loves this Michael— _her Michael_ —and then there are all the many and varied ways she’s loved every other version of Michael she’s ever known. She knows, from experience, that Michael, _her ward,_ and Michael, _her wife,_ couldn’t be two more radically different women while somehow being irrevocably the same. 

She loves them all. She always has. 

So, if later that night Philippa should tease her love into stirring awake, eager not to chase away her grief but to honor it by enticingly winding her hips against the other woman’s center, who would blame her? 

And if Philippa should find herself cradling the back of Michael’s precious crown with awesome fear and holy wonder as the younger woman ravages her bare breast with sharpened teeth and pillowed lips that close around her nipple with a helpless mewl, why shouldn’t she chant her most ardent desire? 

_Tell me you love me._ Philippa cries, voice hitching Like the leg she’s wrapped around Michael’s waist. _Tell me you love me,_ she bucks and moans, salt water welling from her eyes. _Tell me you love me,_ she breathes as snow falls from the sky like ash all around them.

And, _oh_ , how Michael obliges. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> let me know your thoughts! after the time i've had post terra firma, there's definitely more where this came from...
> 
> literally just got here two weeks ago 😭 what was i doing before this ship?


End file.
